How many times have Kyle and I googled "why isn't my baby sleeping" or "best bedtimes for x month old" or "how long should my baby's naps be?" Any time Isaac isn't sleeping the way we wish he was (you know, like at all), we spend the next hour frantically looking up what we're doing wrong and why our baby is so bad. And everywhere we get conflicting advice about the best way to do it.
So what we've been doing is following our hearts: our sweet, pliable, attachment parenting, bleeding hearts. From the time Isaac was about three months old, he slept in bed with us, cozied up either between me and Kyle or between me and the wall. I was able to nurse him whenever he needed to, cuddle up with him when he slept, and attend to his every need right on cue.
But now Sweet Little Baby is over 10 months old, 20 pounds, and not the calmest sleeper in the world. He likes to thrash around in the middle of the night, kick me in the stomach, twist around, babble in his sleep, nurse constantly, and generally keep us up all night. Both for naptimes and at bedtime, Kyle or I would either rock him or nurse him (in my case, not Kyle's) to sleep, and gently transfer him to the crib, where he would either continue to sleep peacefully, or where he would immediately wake up screaming until you started the whole 30, 45, or 60 minute routine again.
I love my baby, but evenings were getting very difficult.
So Kyle and I finally bit the bullet. Last Sunday night, I left the house at 6:00 p.m. and let Kyle start the first night of the dreaded Sleep Training. When I came back at 9:00, the baby was asleep, but it had been an evening fraught with tears and screaming. The next night I stayed in the house, where I tried to keep it together as Isaac fought sleep for about half an hour. Kyle and I had decided in advance we weren't going to let him cry for more than ten minutes at a time, so the evening was spent in ten minute intervals. By Tuesday, though, Isaac went down with just a murmur of protest, and since then, he's in his crib all night, usually from 6:30 p.m. - 6:30 a.m. He seems to be taking it very well: he's in a great mood by morning and is his same bubbly, happy baby self during the day.
Honestly, though, this transition has been really rough on me. I know Isaac is old enough to realize that a) his parents love and care for him deeply even if they don't sleep beside him at night, and b) he needs to learn to sleep on his own (otherwise he'll be rooting around for a boob when he's 10 years old). But even though he's sleeping better, it's still been hard listening to him cry for the 3-5 minutes it takes for him to settle himself down. And it feels very empty at night without a little warm baby body right beside me (no offense to Kyle). Plus not nursing all night has been a hard adjustment on my own body. I may have cried more this past week than the baby has -- tears of guilt for not sleeping with him any more, of sadness for missing him when he's asleep, and of mourning for knowing that my baby is growing up.
In fact, I felt so bad the other night that when Isaac woke up crying at 12:30 a.m., I immediately rushed across the hall to bring him back to our bed. I held on to his little body and snuggled up to him, confident that he'd fall blissfully back asleep now that Mama was holding him.
That is not what happened.
Instead, he did exactly what he was doing two weeks ago: trying to nurse while lying on his stomach, rolling around, sitting up while still asleep, and everything else he could imagine so that Mommy and Daddy didn't get more than a few snatches of sleep the whole night long. My nostalgia for cosleeping quickly waned as I realized this baby of mine is about to enter toddlerhood, and is not the little 12-pound baby of a few months ago.
Logically, putting Isaac to sleep by himself in his crib all night long is the right thing to do. He's too big for us to rock to sleep and put in his crib, and he can't keep needing us to put him back to sleep until he's a kid. Inwardly, though, it's still a hard thing for me to accept (I feel for some reason that I'm failing him). In this Grief Cycle of saying goodbye to my little cosleeping baby and hello to my independently sleeping child, I find myself not googling sleep sites any more, but getting through baby transitions.
